1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to obtaining information on appearance of an object.
2. Related Art
Objects have many different appearances. For example, a surface of polished metal has a smooth and glossy appearance, whereas a surface of fabric has a unique uneven appearance caused by a textured structure generated by warp and woof of the fabric.
There are techniques of generating glossiness information using an image-reading device such as a scanner or an input unit of a photocopier.
However the appearance of an object depends not only on its glossiness, but also on its texture caused by its unevenness, as explained above. Thus, information on glossiness of an object is not sufficient to enable realistic reproduction of an image of the object.
The present invention has been made in view of the above circumstances, and provides device and method for obtaining appearance information.